Posts tagged ‘Paramount’

My boys have never seen the Mission: Impossible films, so we are slowly working our way through all of them prior to seeing Rogue Nation. I saw the first two in the cinema way back when and my daughter swears up and down that I also saw Mission: Impossible III. Um, nope. I would’ve remembered it based on the beautifully tense pre-credits sequence alone.

Wow. Awesome. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a wonderfully insidious son of a bitch, the exact level of baddie that was missing from the first two films. The first film got a little too caught up in confusing people with convoluted pseudo-espionage, and as much as I love John Woo the second film focused a little too heavily on overly stylized action set pieces. J. J. Abrams caught the perfect combination of both in this film. Normally I despise flashback-based storytelling and hand-held shakycams, but both worked extremely well here. And the cinematography in this film was gorgeous.

After being less than impressed with the first episode of Z Nation, I felt I should follow through with taking a peek at the 2D unrated cut of World War Z. I figured it couldn’t give me much more of a headache than the 3D theatrical cut did.

Surprise #1: storywise, the unrated cut is not significantly different than the theatrical cut. There are no major subplots added. Somewhat disappointing, but some subtle scene extensions helped the story make a little more sense. A litte.

Surprise #2: although the unrated cut is more violent and bloodier than the theatrical cut, it’s not a total all-out gorefest. Some horror releases will use the “unrated cut” excuse to amp up splattering to the Nth degree. That didn’t happen here. Somewhat disappointing, in that I was expecting a LOT more gore, but on the other hand it was also somewhat of a relief.

Surprise #3: the film actually held my attention and my interest, in spite of the fact that I knew what was going to happen. Part of that was because I was watching to see what was different between the two cuts, but even so it ended up engaging me more than I expected.

It’s still a crap film overall. It’s even worse when you consider it an adaptation of its source material. But in spite of my geeky love for 3D, if I ever had to sit someone down and force them to watch this, I would force them to watch the 2D unrated cut.

Is that an endorsement? No. As I said, it’s still a crap film. And I am still hoping that the original pre-reshoot cut will surface someday.

Okay, I went into this film with low expectations … I loved the original novel, so I waited long enough that I could barely remember the novel. I also understand that films are not novels, so I should not necessarily expect the same exact story as portrayed in the novel. As a matter of fact, there are a few films that I thought were better than the novels that they were originally based on – three that immediately come to mind are Jaws, Christine and From Russia With Love.

So I knew that I should not expect the same story as the novel … and I heard that if this film had not been titled after the novel that the audience reaction would have been more accepting … and I also heard that, for people who were not familiar with the novel or could set the novel aside, it was actually a pretty good zombie flick.

NO! It fucking sucks!

I had the same problem with this as I did for series 4 of The Walking Dead – I was rooting for the zombies! And for any zombie apocalypse narrative, that’s a very big problem. I had absolutely no empathy or sympathy for Brad Pitt’s character at all. The film actually jumped around too much (in spite of the jumpy source material) and some aspects of the story made no sense whatsoever. And the 3D effects were horrible – more often than not, I was wondering whether or not I was actually watching a 3D film. And the ultimate resolution in the film? Ridiculous and ludicrous.

On one hand, I want to sit down and really dissect all of the problems with this film, but on the other hand I have better things to do. (Like catching up on a backlog of other reviews that I need to rant about.)

I will give it this much: 1) It was a pleasure to see Peter Capaldi as a WHO doctor before he took over the title role of Doctor Who. 2) I would actually love to see the original cut of the film, before they went back and did some reportedly significant reshoots. Hopefully that will come out at some point. But then again, I’m still waiting for the director’s cut of Hard Target, too. 3) I am going to go back and watch the non-3D unrated cut of this at some point. If I feel that version of this film offers any level of redemption, I’ll be sure to update this entry accordingly.